Psalm 27:4

Have you every been impacted with a verse so much that you keep going back to it again and again? Psalm 27:4 is one of those verses for me, especially coming from my Christian Hedonist perspective. It says:

"One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after:
that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life,
to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire (or meditate) in His temple." (ESV)

I ablsolutely love this verse. To me, it is the perfect picture of worship. Worship is about loving God and wanting to gaze upon Him and never stop. But it is not just love. This love comes through and inspires knowledge of God. If we love God we will seek to inquire of Him and meditate on Him. As lovers of God, if we had one request of God, David is saying, this should be it. If we had one wish, it should be to dwell in the house of the LORD every moment that we are on this earth because in His house we can see and know our awesome Lord, Saviour, and Treasure. Like the post before this I decided to write a page about this verse. This is definitely a verse that I would like to do for a sermon sometime in the future (whenever God decides that that will happen). So here it is:

What is it to dwell in the house of the Lord? It is to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to meditate upon His truths – to know Him. Here is a description of both head and heart. The idea of gazing upon or beholding the beauty of the Lord seems to be that of adoration, love. Like a man beholding his bride, but yet we are the bride. We are to love and adore God. We are to long to see His face and when we do we don’t look away, for it is beautiful.

But yet this cannot be taken by itself. For if we adore the beauty of God without knowledge then we are looking at a magazine ad. Our love cannot be real. It is vacuous, empty – it is lust. Our love and adoration must be according to knowledge. However, the same can be said of knowledge. For if we have knowledge without love then we are a scholar who misses the point of his studies. We are the scholar who attends so much to his studies that he forgets his wife. We are a scholar who refuses to leave the library and look at the Alps or the Grand Canyon and misses the beauty of God revealed in creation.

In either scenario (love without knowledge, or knowledge without love) we become idolaters. For if we love someone without seeking to know more about that person then our love is not real and is, at best, lust. It is a seeking after ungodly pleasure, and desire for the blessings and benefits of being a child of God and bride of Christ without really loving the source of those gifts. It is an adoration of the gifts and not the giver. And if we seek knowledge without love then we make an idol out of knowledge. Love abounds from knowledge (Phil. 1:9) and if we don’t have love but have knowledge then we did not understand what that knowledge was meant to do in our lives. The knowledge of God is meant to cause us to love Him more. The more we know about our God, the more we are to love Him. Therefore, if we do not have love, then we have placed our focus on the gaining of knowledge rather than on the purpose of that knowledge – we have made an idol out of it.

No, we cannot be the person with a vacuous, empty love, or the scholar who misses the point and won’t look outside. Our love must spring from knowledge and love must push us to know more. For if we pursue knowledge out of love for God then we make much of God and He is supreme in our lives. But if we pursue knowledge without love then we make much of knowledge and ourselves in that we seek to exalt ourselves through our knowledge. Knowledge and love cannot be separated if our worship and adoration of God is to be true. We must gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and meditate in His temple for love abounds in real knowledge and all discernment (Phil. 1:9). This spirit will be in all God’s children and true disciples.